The pre-production stages of animated filmmaking vary from one movie to another, but it generally involves development, storing, art and production management. In various stages, iterative reviewing and editing might be required, and they might be specialized review. For example, one artist might focus on lighting, while another artist focuses on the appearance of hair and fur, while yet another focuses on facial expressions. As should be apparent, if the artist focusing on facial expressions has to repeatedly scroll through commentary related to hair and landscape or other comments not part of that artist's responsibility or focus, the reviewing process can be time-consuming or even tedious.
A video sequence comprises a series of frames (images) designed to be played in order. A video sequence might or might not have a corresponding audio portion that is played in sync with the video sequence. Images (whether individual images or frames of video) might be reviewed and commented on by a production supervisor, director, etc. and the comments provided to an artist, technician, etc. for handling. In some cases, the production supervisor might review many different aspects of the image and provide comments to different artists.
The supervisor can review different aspects separately and provide separate comments to each artist. For example, the supervisor might draw comments on a copy of the image to provide feedback to one artist, draw comments on another copy for another artist and record audio comments for yet another artist. In some cases, because of the number of people required to make a feature length film, one person might be a reviewer who provides comments on specific portions of the film with a different person being the person who reviews the comments and makes edits. The reviewer might not want to be tied to making comments separately for each artist or destination of the comments, and might not even know how the work is to be divided when making the review comments. Therefore, flexible editing tools are often required.
One such review tool that is known is Pixar's “Review Sketch” review tool, aspects of which are described in [Weber2008] and [Wolff]. The review tool includes software that provides an intuitive interface for supervisors, such as film directors, to annotate video streams and/or images where the annotations are stored as an additional “comment” layer that can be overlaid on top of the video streams and/or images. Artists then can use the multi-layer images to modify and continue their work. As explained in [Weber2000], sometimes the review tool helped the reviewing process, but different reviewers might have different comment input preferences. Some reviewers tend to prefer just pointing to elements on the image and speaking about changes required, instead of sketching. One artist might be a good note-taker in a co-located review session. Others might miss reviewer's comment details in a fast-paced production schedule. With larger teams that might not all be geographically close, a bare visual representation of the final review could introduce ambiguity. Some comments might not be addressed with the drawing itself. One work-around is to have assistants transcribing reviewer notes, but that leads to delays and often leads to a cumbersome workflow.
In the filmmaking process, a supervisor reviews the visual data being created, such as stills of video, and provides feedback. This commentary can be conveyed in many ways. Different types of directorial suggestions may use different means of expression. For example, a suggestion about the “mood” of a character might be described by physical acting or by verbal description, but this is often not convenient if the artist who is to make the changes and the director are not in the same place. The director might record a video commentary or an audio commentary, which the artist can play back or watch.
In some cases, the feedback includes pointers to specific areas of an image. For example, a director might provide the feedback “Move the character's arms out further, to her, for better effect” and have that comment indicating by drawing on the image.
Methods and systems for reviewing should be simple and intuitive, because often reviewers are extremely busy and do not have time to learn how to use computers or learn how to use complicated software. The annotation methods and tools should be fast, lightweight, and fit into an existing review workflow, if necessary. However, they also need to be flexible in allowing a reviewer to review many different topics that might go to multiple people for handling. The annotation logistics should be simple and the annotation tools should be compatible with different types of visual signals. For example, in computer animation, work to be reviewed is sometimes reviewed from digital video, the artist's computer screen, or other source.
A simple approach for a director or other reviewer to give animators visual feedback is to have an image to be projected on a screen, provide the director a laser pointer or other pointer to allow for pointing to problem areas of the image, and have someone take notes as to where the director is pointing. “Whiteboarding” techniques could be used to electronically capture the pointing, but still requires some structuring of the comments ahead of time.
Another approach is to annotate an information stream wherein the reviewer drafts draft textual or graphic notes while viewing a video clip, and have a system record a timestamp in the video clip the moment the note was created. This technique has also been used with specialized pens that record on specialized paper markings, while simultaneously recording what the user wrote and heard. Subsequently, when the notes are reviewed, using the time stamp, the appropriate place in the video clip is located.
Some of these techniques include many significant drawbacks. One drawback is that it imposes a strictly linear notation strategy on the review process. In other words, the director would have to annotate the video as it were being shown.
Accordingly, what is desired are improved methods and apparatus addressing the drawbacks discussed above.